Desktop computers, as popularized by the Personal Computer (PC) of the 1980s, depended heavily on keyboards for data input and control. Additional flexibility occurred shortly afterward by the use of mice and other pointing devices. The keyboard permitted rapid inputs—to the limits of expert touch typists, while mice permitted rapid operation of ephemeral controls such as pull-down and pop-up menus. Such input devices are so pervasive now, that after several generations, the keyboards have been designed to unfold, and pointing devices have been reduced to miniature joysticks positioned in the interstices between keys. This has led to miniaturization of the user interface to snuggly fit under a display in most laptop computers. Even PDA form-factors have been accommodated with keyboards that fold up in a manner similar to accordions.
While computers have long been constructed for serious, deliberative work, and occasionally games, the efforts by makers of mobile stations, particularly mobile telephones, have provided devices that put a premium on compactness, and secondarily addressed issues such as getting serious, non-voice work done. Consequently, advances in user interface have concentrated on making the mobile station perform voice functions ever-so-quickly and with minimal demands of attention from, e.g. eyeballs. This push has led to innovations such as one-touch dialing, last (and second-to-last, and third-to-last) number redial, and voice recognized dialing.
The mobile telephone is a mobile station having all mechanical parts and electrical circuits necessary to make the digital entries, e.g. keypads, graffiti surfaces, roller-keys, and display output, e.g. LCDs, lights or other visual stimuli. Such mechanical parts and electrical circuits are not essential to the operation of a mobile station operated for its central purpose of transmitting and receiving voice frequencies.
Even further leading to the drive of making the ubiquitous mobile telephone unobtrusive and invisible is a movement to make phone operation relatively hands-free, such as, by addition of a handset or speaker phone that permits operation of the phone while focussing eyes and hands on other activities.
Concurrent with a design evolution of ever-smaller mobile phones, has been a improvement in various proprioceptive sensors or motion sensors—both in size and in price. A proprioceptive sensor is a sensor that has the ability to sense the position or orientation or movement of itself without the need to sense pressure on a button or a connection with a contacting external conductor. Proprioceptive sensors include inclinometers, accelerometers, gyroscopes and compasses among others. Proprioceptive sensors do not include limit switches or other devices that require contact with an external object for proper operation. Proprioceptive sensors operate on a number of different principals that detect the force of gravity, accelerations such as caused by vibration, centripetal forces among others. Some devices may operate without reference to outside objects or entities. For example, a gyroscope will typically indicate a change from a starting position, wherein the starting position is arbitrary. On the other hand, inclinometers typically are highly influenced by, and thus are referenced to the center of the earth's gravitational pull, and thus tend to operate with reference to this well known location.
Motion sensing has been in use many years for such things as security systems, weapon systems, spacecraft among others. Inertial sensors such as accelerometers and gyroscopes have aided aircraft and submarines for decades now.
Externally referenced sensors include infrared reflection sensors, sometimes called electronic eyes. Such a sensor detects position relative to another object. In the case of the infrared reflection sensors, the device provides one signal when there is a direct line of sight to a nearby reflector, and another signal when there is no direct line of sight to a nearby reflector. In many cases, an infrared reflection sensor is very cheap compared to more sophisticated proprioceptive sensors, e.g. gyroscopes. Moreover, infrared is well understood in terms of sizing and packaging, and easily incorporated into many devices, though for generally higher value-added functions of communications.
The mobile phone type of mobile station has inherited the nearly universal 12-key arrangement of its desktop predecessors, i.e. the digits 1 through 10 and the pound ‘#’ and star ‘*’ keys. The relative shrinkage in the mobile phone form factor concurrently has driven keytops to be reduced such that the surface area of all keys tends to be smaller than the combined surface area of four keys of a typical QWERTY keypad. The keypad's ergonomics have come under increasing scrutiny as a critical mass of users of the Short Messaging Service available in Global Systems for Mobiles (GSM) (and other systems) has been achieved. In other words, so many people have access to a phone-as-messenger, that billions of brief text-based messages are exchanged globally each month. The success of this mode of communication has even surprised the architects of the GSM standard.
Heavy use of a keypad may be necessary when a mobile station supports forms of internet browsing, such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and I-mode. One response to heavy text input has been U.S. Pat. No. 5,818,437, “Reduced keyboard disambiguating computer”, which may be implemented in the popular T9™ user interface. T9 requires a substantial memory space to be devoted to store at least one language database. Nevertheless, the T9 interface rarely provides accurate translation to intended words and names in situations where abbreviations, family names, school names, website addresses, slang, street names or small company names are being input.
Computer text handling involves processing and encoding. Consider, for example, a word processor user typing text at a keyboard. The computer's system software receives a message or signal that the user pressed a key combination for “T”, which it encodes, using a character encoding standard such as Unicode, as U+0054, a number. The word processor stores the number in memory, and also passes it on to the display software responsible for putting the character on the screen. The display software, which may be a window manager or part of the word processor itself, uses the number as an index to find an image of a “T”, which it draws on the monitor screen. The process continues as the user types in more characters.
It should be noted, that a character encoding is an abstract entity which may correspond to a mark made on a display or paper, known as a glyph. Such a character encoding may just as easily be used as a command to control, e.g. a game display. A character encoding may correspond to glyphs such as letters in the Latin alphabet, or to pictograms in a Chinese alphabet. A glyph may have different forms, such as may be provided by a font. A glyph may be presented in a number of different ways, controlled by application software. Such ways may include point size variations, color variations and various ornamentation to a character, such as by way of underlining or italicizing.
Just as keyboards may provide a control mechanism for generally desk-bound computer games, a keypad of a mobile station may be relied upon to provide inputs for computer mediated games, either built-in or accessed wirelessly. This may provoke wear on the diminutive 12-key keypad, as well as occasional discomfort in a user's hands. To extend the life of keypads, and diminish unsightly wear on the outer cover of a mobile station, it would be helpful if a non-impact input method could be used to produce or simulate game inputs, which may appear as code point entries or character encodings.
Complexity of a digital mobile phone has risen markedly in recent years. The Nokia 6100 series of mobile phones, provided nine main menus of functionality. Each menu averages about four submenus. Frequently a list of choices under the submenu is provided. A manual to describe the features has over 70 pages. Even more pages are in manuals of the new variants of the Nokia 6100 mobile phone which provide a text message origination feature. Supplemental contextual help may be displayed on the small screens of such mobile phones, but many features remain inaccessible to people because the features are buried within an increasingly convoluted menu tree. One way to alleviate such difficulties is to make common features a one to three keystroke task. Examples include:
One-touch dialing, wherein a continuous press of a button causes a call to be made to a preset number;
Keypad locking and unlocking, wherein two keystrokes enable and disable the feature;
Profile swapping, wherein a rapid press of a button associated with the power-on function and a two-stroke menu selection choose the loudness and melody (among other) of incoming calls.
Such features, using an economy of user inputs, are very easy to learn and tend to be disseminated also by word of mouth. Unfortunately, a person's ability to remember keystroke sequences is limited, and it is likely that for most people, no more features can be remembered than are available in the current phone models being made. Moreover, word-of-mouth training is best achieved where the control mechanism is simple, particularly if it requires no knowledge of alphanumeric symbols.
In many western cultures amongst school aged children, there is a minority of kids that get caught up in a trading culture or fad; e.g., trade in baseball cards, Pokemon™, Magic: the Gathering. Such a culture of face-to-face discussion, swapping, gaming based on portable trading elements has created a large following of hobbyists. An electronic trading system that may be similar to such a trading system is shown by U.S. Pat. NC13994, (Mobile entities) wherein electronic agents having multimedia capabilities may be transmitted by, e.g. wireless modes, between supporting hardware, e.g. mobile stations. It would be beneficial to overlay a UI onto a mobile phone interface to facilitate such trade and interaction with mobile entities or other forms of agents. Unfortunately, this creates yet another menu branch in an already detailed menuing system—which amounts to clutter to people not engaged in such a trading culture. Nevertheless, such Mobile entities, which may be elaborate scripts, may be commanded to transmit themselves by short wireless links to a nearby device. Triggering such a transfer also requires an input method.
Incoming calls may occur at inopportune times. Examples include, during a meal, while exercising or while traveling. Stories in the press describe situations where people take calls in movie theaters, and even a case of a doctor taking a call during surgery. Often, it would be helpful to inform a caller of the context in which a call is received—or even to provide a uniformly simple and visible way to silence operation of the ringer. Nevertheless, a principal way of dealing with an inopportune call, for at least 20 years, is to permit a voice messaging system to make a voice recording of the caller. An educated guess as to the condition of the owner of a phone can be discerned if it is known what position a phone is in or what sort of vibrations or other accelerations are acting on it, including acceleration due to gravity. For example, a mobile station is frequently stored in a fixed position in relation to a dashboard when a user of the mobile station is driving. If a calling party were to know this, such a caller would be in a position to be more conscientious concerning the duration and subject matter of their call. Less time could be spent inquiring about the driver's current status and location, and more conversation time could be spent discussing the matter at hand.
In addition, a universally understood act of politeness, visible at a distance, would help assure people that in situations calling for respectful silence, the phone will remain silent.